The New Yorker Radio Hour - Michael R. Jackson on “A Strange Loop,” His Black, Queer Coming-of-Age Musical

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Michael R. Jackson’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “A Strange Loop” features a Black queer writer named Usher, who works as an usher, struggling to write a musical about a Black queer writer. Jackson’s work tackles the terror of the blank page alongside the terrors of the dating scene, and it speaks in frank and heartbreaking terms about Usher’s attempt to navigate gay life among Black and white partners. Hilton Als talked with Jackson about how he found inspiration in his own experience seeking identity and community. “I started writing the original monologue—building a sort of life raft for myself—to understand myself,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t until I got to a place of understanding that in my life I was caught up in a loop of self-hatred, that I could see what Usher’s problem was, and therefore what the structure of the piece was that would lead him out of that and into a better place.” “A Strange Loop” is playing now at the Lyceum Theatre, on Broadway. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Usher, Usher, Usher, Usher, Usher, Michael, oh my God, you're on Broadway. Yeah, it's crazy, right? That's composer and playwright Michael R. Jackson. And he talked with the New Yorker's Hilton Halls in April when his musical A Strange Loop opened on Broadway. A Strange Loop had won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, and last Sunday, it also won the Tony Award for Best Musical. A Strange Loop is about a man named Usher, who also happens to work as an Usher. He's a black queer writer who's writing a musical about, wait for it, a black queer writer,

who is writing about a black queer writer. Usher sings about the terror of the blank page and also the terrors of dating and sex, in terms that are pretty frank for a musical. Staff writer Hilton All's talk with Michael R. Jackson about a strange loop. One of the things that is so extraordinary about this show is that we have never seen anything remotely like it on stage or in a book or in a movie. There's just been nothing like it, Michael. And I wanted to ask you for the folks out there, what was the genesis of you writing a play about a gay musical theater playwright? as an usher talking about his life while trying to write a musical about AIDS and among other things?

Well, it started as a monologue initially that I wrote in between graduating from undergrad, playwriting, and going to grad school for musical theater writing. At the time, I was about 22, 23 years old, and I was just very uncertain of my place in the world and where I would go with a BFA degree. Where had you studied? I studied at NYU in the Dramatic Writing Program. And I had moved, my friend Kisha had been living in this little old lady's house in Jamaica, and she got a live-in nanny job in Tribeca.

So then I moved into the little old lady's house in Jamaica, Queens, all the way at the last stop on the E-Train and the F-Train. and then you take a bus from the train to get to her house. And I just lived upstairs in this bungalow-style house. And I was like, what am I going to do? Like, I don't know what to do. And, like, my student loans were coming due, and my parents wanted to know what I was going to do with my life.

And America was about to go to war with Iraq. And I was just like, just this little black gay boy, just sitting, you know, upstairs in this old lady's house. So I started writing this monologue. It's about, you know, a young black man walking around, you know, New York, wondering why life was so terrible. And just reflecting on lots of whatever was going on in the world at that time. Yes. I went to grad school about nine months later.

So I decided to try my hand finally at writing my own song. And the song that came out of that was the song Memory Song, which would end up being the penultimate song in a strange loop. How long was the process between that monologue and you reaching the stage at Playwright's Horizon? Oh, it's about 16 years. Wow. Wow. You shared with me off off radio as a very early love.

You shared with me off radio as it were, your very early love of people like Tori Amos and Linda Ronstadt and all those girls and all those girls who can sing, as they say, but also writing songs that matter to you a great deal. Do you think that they had a great or at least a galvanizing influence on your writing music and lyrics? Yeah, so I will say first that like I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, Motown, and like my parents, you know, are like children of of the 50s and 60s and 70s. And so that music, like Motown Sound, Philadelphia Sound, all of that stuff was in gospel music.

All of that was very much a part of my world as a kid and growing up. So that was there. But then within that, my cousin Zanita had gone to Interlaken, and then she got kicked out. But what he brought back was the album Under the Pink and Little Earthquakes by Toramus, who for whatever reason he thought I might enjoy it. And so he gave me her copies of those albums.

And so one night when I was about 15, I decided to listen to Under the Pink. And I turned off the lights, put on my headphones, press play on the disc man. And then the first thing I hear is, tears on the sleeve of a man, don't want to be a boy today. And I was like, oh shit, it's on.

Like, it was something about that just, like, reached into my soul. I was just sort of coming out at that time. I was in my most angst-ridden place. I could have been as a teenager. And this, like, red-haired piano playing white woman just was reading me for filth. Yeah. Even though it was her life. It wasn't really about me.

But there was something about the way she approached her feelings. and her thoughts, the order of her, the way he ordered her thoughts, the vulnerability, the sexuality, the talking about religion. Because then the next song goes, God, sometimes you just don't come through. And I was like, you know, black boy raised up in a Baptist church, you know, hearing that like being gay is bad and you're going to go to hell and AIDS and all this stuff. And like that music, it gave me like a real outlet. to really start questioning a lot of what I was raised with and under and around and like, you know, feeling like it was okay to be a weirdo within, you know, my category, my identity category.

I think that one of the things that is so extraordinary about this piece is your freedom in it. Yes. You want to give voice to something that I had, you know, had never seen and I'm ancient. on stage in terms of not only this the artistic process for the for the protagonist but also parallel to his disappointment or experiences in in the gay world um ideas about um sexuality and love can you can you talk to me a bit a bit about that yeah so you know i something came before i'm from Detroit, and I actually came of age in the mid to late 90s as a gay teenager. But like at a time when the world was slowly starting to sort of move toward acceptance for

white gay people. But like, meanwhile, in my little world, there was a whole bunch of black gay boys around me who were all, like, it was like I was called it the black gay teenage storyline. It was like this little, like, melodrama happening under, you know, behind the scenes. And, like, an eye, as I was coming out into that, still felt like kind of an outsider, even within, like, my own category. But then when I moved to New York, it was, like, things shifted into what I, in the show is called Gayville, like, Exile and Gayville, like, the white gays and, like, trying to

orient myself to that. Usher enters the sexual marketplace. Looking into You can do this. You can do this. In terms of like being a black gay who didn't fit in with like these white gays for all kinds of

physical reasons or racial reasons, whatever, but also competing with other black gays for the white gays. attention, but not measuring up to the black gaze competing for the white attention either, and the alienation that came from that at that time as somebody who hadn't found any sort of confidence or self-love, you know, within his body. Plus, just the baggage of having been raised with a lot of homophobia and shame and all of that, it all was like swirling. in a loop, one night's saying.

And so in the show itself, I just wanted to tackle that and what it feels like to be in the middle of that. 6'2, 179 pounds, muscular single, packing in the front and in the back, able to take care of all your anal needs. Just say hi. Looking into home.

Undetectable paws bottom, taking lows in the toilet at Lucky Burger on 52nd Street, just steps away from industry and therapy. Come parking right here, gents. Don't be screwed. Just say hi. Looking into Hung. Laying back, nice guy here.

No agenda, no drama. Just checking things out. Maybe looking for a gym buddy. Loll. Top, if it goes there. Just say hi. Hi. Hi.

Too black. Too black. You're dick too small. You're dick too small. You don't dick too small. And when was the last time you got your bussy information with Beyonce? I would go to the LGBT center to these, like, really humiliating speed dating events and, like, not get picked by anyone. And again, it was, like, a predominantly white thing.

And I couldn't figure out, like, this, like, it just, it was all very confusing. Too fat and black to live at all. So why don't you just ravage me with your white gay dance savagery? I mean, one of the things that is profound about the piece, of course, is the way in which you really talk about the white male gay gays and how your protagonist is used to fit uneasily certain kinds of fantasies about black queerness. And I wondered, was that experience something that you found as dispiriting as your protagonist? Or was it something that you felt that you knew that politically was, there were, the roots were kind of rotten?

You mean for Inwood Daddy? Yes. So the Inwood Daddy scene in a Strange Loop is one where a shorter protagonist goes to meet an older, white man who he connected with on, you know, an app like Grindr or Scruff or something like that.

And he goes to his apartment in Inwood in northern Manhattan. And he ends up in a very racist sexual encounter with this man. But this man assumes that Usher is into being

degraded racially. And he like says a lot of disturbing. and racist things to him during sex, that Usher does not refute. Right. He doesn't challenge it. Right. So that scene and that in my relationship to it

is a really interesting one, because it's very tricky. That white man in that scene is using Usher, the protagonist, in a particular way. But Usher the protagonist willingly participates in that.

And that's part of what the song that he sings after, that encounter called Boundaries, is about. Did I do that? What did that do for me? What a performer? Where are my boundaries? For me, it's too easy to say, oh, these white men are, like, praying on black boys.

I mean, there's a truth in that, for sure. But there's also another piece of bit that, like, somebody comes from a place of desperation, of shame, of low self-esteem, that you, that you will, when you come from that place, you will often, um, subjectate yourself to another person. Yes. Thinking that that will get you validation, love, acceptance, whatever. And then when it doesn't, you know, you have to sit with yourself and like what your part in that was. and what their part was in it for sure, but like what your part was in it. And that's certainly something that I went through in my life,

you know, many times in these kinds of situations. They weren't necessarily as extreme as this, but they sometimes felt like they were. Why play the missing? What are my boundary? Do you think that the piece, that a strange loop, helped you evolve as a person?

Oh, absolutely. And to let go of certain of the scenarios that are in the piece? I do. Because the thing about it is that, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I started writing the original monologue as a sort of building a sort of life wrath for myself to understand myself. And it wasn't until I got to a place of understanding that in my life, I was caught up in a loop of self-hatred

that I could see what Usher's problem was and therefore what the structure of the piece was that would lead him out of that and into like a better place what that meant was in my own life that it allowed me to get to like higher ground. I should stop over thinking, thing that's tough unleash my hungry lion

because it all... It didn't mean that All my problems went away, but it meant that I could understand my humanity and my selfhood as being something that was not inherently flawed in some way that I couldn't escape and therefore had to keep trying to fix. And may the journey never end, Michael, right? Yeah, you know, the yellow brick road doesn't have to end here. Life is fabulous for ladies after 40 Michael, thank you. You are a treasure. Thank you, Hilton. I always love talking to you.

Yes, and I'll see you very soon. Maybe I don't need changing. I should read, just an illusion. If thoughts are just an illusion. Michael R. Jackson, talking with staff writer Hilton Al's back in April. On Sunday, a strange loop won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening.